Sick Bricks combines the best of Lego and Skylanders

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Spinmaster unveiled Sick Bricks at New York Toy Fair this week, this much I was expecting. More surprising was how far along the game was and how well it integrated and extended elements from other Toys to Life brands.

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For starters, it offers an integrated brick-based toy-video-game hybrid ahead of Lego dipping its toe in the water with Minifigures Online and Ultra Agents. It includes upgradeable characters with a Skylanders Swap Force-style mix-and-match mechanic that also brings in toy vehicles as well as heroes. It comes with its own tie-in TV show. It also creates a battling and puzzle experience in the style of a Lego video-game that feels less limited on a tablet that TT Games' smartphone and tablet efforts to date.

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The basic premise is a set of collectable brick characters sold in blind bags and packs of two or five. Characterisation here takes things to the edge of irreverence without being offensive. Hiro Thunderbolt is a sumo wrestler with a fart attack, Rotten Walker is a zombie who pukes on enemies, Rusty Nuggets is a KFC-style rooster with bombs and Tiberious Warpspeed is a Kirk-a-like sci-fi character with a laser blaster.

The band of heroes feel like the sort of designs that kids will love and parents will scratch their heads about -- surely it's a good sign when mum and dad don't get it? The range will be released in waves and different characters will be rare or hard to find -- as is the tried and trusted approach of Toys to Life games.

The other half of the Sick Bricks puzzle is the video game. This offers a tablet and smartphone experience on iOS and Android not a million miles away from the Lego video-games, with a variety of worlds to explore, punctuated with hide-out missions.

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Different to the Lego games though, players can upgrade their characters abilities and equip them with different weapons, hats and the like for stat boosts and new attacks. Here we get more into Disney Infinity and Skylanders territory as players will create an on-going connection with a particular brick toy.

While you can earn characters in the game, the real novelty is being able to beam in your physical toys to expand your forces.

Simply place your two-piece brick character in front of the smartphone camera and hey presto, they appear in the game.

Like Swap Force, each of the characters has abilities tied to the top and bottom of the toy. This means that if you switch Hiro's head with Tiberius' legs you get a farting space hero (or laser-blasting sumo wrestler). It's a simple mechanic, but one that works well in practice and creates a strong connection between toy and game.

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Again like Skylanders, in the game you need to have certain combinations of Sick Brick team characters to unlock special chests and earn rewards. The Sick Brick teams are comprised of Ninjas, City, Monsters, Space, Mutants, Superheroes, Robots and Fighters. Alongside the team function in the game this will also drive collection of the characters for young players.

Beating Skylanders though, Sick Bricks offers in-game vehicles that your characters can drive or ride. These relate to the physical toys that offer some packs with larger big-fig style pieces that can be beamed in for this purpose.

All this is underlined by an upcoming Cartoon Network series coming for Sick Bricks that takes this offering above and beyond what is found elsewhere.

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Perhaps the biggest challenge to the game is convincing those avid toy collectors (both young and old) that the physical product is worth collecting. While each character costs considerably less than ranges like Skylander, Disney Infinity, Anki Overdrive or even Angry Birds Transformers, this is also reflected in the quality of the toy.

Each character is highly detailed but with fewer paint passes and more limited materials that other collectable figure lines.

Also the main plastic material they are made out of feels more flimsy and light weight to that of standard Lego bricks.

Another challenge will be for Spinmaster to balance physical and in-app purchases. While the Sick Brick website clearly states that the game is free to play and includes in-game transactions that can be disabled, exactly how much can be spent is still unclear. Most important will be a clear statement of whether it's cheaper to buy the characters in the game or to buy the physical toys.

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Here it's good to see that the lowest value pack is automatically selected when making in-app purchases for in game currency of silver studs or gold bars.

The game launches in the UK on 12th March, so many of these details should be cleared up by then. Either way, Sick Bricks looks like a confident first step into this increasingly crowded Toys to Life genre where longstanding first-mover advantage for the likes of Skylanders and

Disney Infinity is diminishing in favour of innovation and speed of delivery from games like this.